Survive: Zombie Defense is a free game themed around survival horror. It blends elements of shoot-em-up, strategy, and town planning to tell a story of a zombie apocalypse and the scattered heroes who must fight the living dead to survive.

While there are many other zombie games, including Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies and Left 4 Dead, this title has an unusual mix of genre elements. You will need to put as much thought into building farms as shooting zombies.

Defend your stronghold

Survive: Zombie Defense has two components. The most prominent one includes the actual zombie battles. This section of the game puts you in charge of a building. Once you click the "start" button, the zombies will attack. Control your character to gun them down and earn money, which you can spend on upgrading defenses or hiring new recruits.

A town simulator

The other component of Survive: Zombie Defense is a town-planning sim with a narrative drive, which occurs between levels. Here, you take control of a zombie-free settlement and can use resources to build farms and other forms of infrastructure.

The gameplay is different, but the aims are linked. Gaining new land and settlement resources will require completing new rounds of the zombie-shooting component.

A story-driven game

Survive: Zombie Defense has a plot that unfolds as you open new areas and reach new characters. The various survivors have full dialogue scenes, complete with voices. Plus, the narrative follows them as they argue amongst themselves about the best course of survival.

Simpler than it looks

The range of different gameplay elements in Survive: Zombie Defense might make it seem over-complicated at first, but it becomes fairly simple once you break it down into its components. In some ways, it might be too simple. For example, the zombie-shooting levels are very similar to one another, despite multiple enemy types.